Magnetic resonance is a phenomenon exhibited by a select group of atomic nuclei and is based upon the existence of nuclear magnetic moments in these nuclei (termed “gyromagnetic” nuclei). When a gyromagnetic nucleus is placed in a strong, uniform and steady magnetic field (a so-called “external field” and referred to herein as a “static” magnetic field), it precesses at a natural frequency known as a Larmor frequency. The Larmor frequency is characteristic of each nuclear type and is dependent on the applied field strength in the location of the nucleus. Typical gyromagnetic nuclei include 1H (protons), 13C, 19F and 31P. The precession frequencies of the nuclei can be observed by monitoring the transverse magnetization that results after a strong RF pulse applied at or near their Larmor frequencies. It is common practice to convert the measured signal to a frequency spectrum by means of Fourier transformation.
More specifically, when a bulk sample containing nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) active nuclei is placed within a magnetic field, the nuclear spins distribute themselves amongst the nuclear magnetic energy levels in accordance with Boltzmann's statistics. This results in a population imbalance between the energy levels and a net nuclear magnetization. It is this net nuclear magnetization that is studied by NMR techniques.
At equilibrium, the net nuclear magnetization is aligned parallel to the external magnetic field and is static. A second magnetic field perpendicular to the first and rotating at, or near, the Larmor frequency can be applied to induce a coherent motion of the net nuclear magnetization. Since, at conventional field strengths, the Larmor frequency is in the megahertz frequency range, this second field is called a “radio frequency” or RF field.
In particular, a short (microsecond) pulse of RF radiation is applied to the sample in the static magnetic field; this pulse is equivalent to irradiating at a range of frequencies. The free induction decay (FID) in response to the RF pulse is measured as a function of time. The response of the sample to the pulse depends upon the RF energy absorption of the sample over a range of frequencies applied (for example, 500 MHz±2500 Hz). Often the pulse is applied many times and the results are averaged to improve the signal-to-noise ratio.
The coherent motion of the nuclear magnetization about the RF field is called a “nutation.” In order to deal conveniently with this nutation, a reference frame is used which rotates about the z-axis at the Larmor frequency. In this “rotating frame” part of the RF field, which is rotating in the stationary “laboratory” reference frame in the same direction as the magnetization, is static. Consequently, the effect of the RF field is to rotate the nuclear magnetization direction at an angle with respect to the main static field direction. By convention, an RF field pulse of sufficient length to rotate the nuclear magnetization through an angle of 90° or π/2 radians is called a “π/2 pulse.”
A π/2 pulse applied with a frequency near the nuclear resonance frequency will rotate the spin magnetization from an original direction along the main static magnetic field direction into a plane perpendicular to the main magnetic field direction. The component of the net magnetization that is transverse to the main magnetic field precesses about the main magnetic field at the Larmor frequency. This precession can be detected with a receiver coil that is resonant at the precession frequency and located such that the precessing magnetization induces a voltage across the coil. Frequently, the “transmitter coil” employed for generating the RF field to the sample and the “receiver coil” employed for detecting the magnetization are one and the same coil.
In addition to precessing at the Larmor frequency, in the absence of the applied RF field, the nuclear magnetization also undergoes two relaxation processes: (1) the precessions of various individual nuclear spins which generate the net nuclear magnetization become dephased with respect to each other so that the magnetization within the transverse plane loses phase coherence (so-called “spin-spin relaxation”) with an associated relaxation time, T2, and (2) the individual nuclear spins return to their equilibrium population of the nuclear magnetic energy levels (so-called “spin-lattice relaxation”) with an associated relaxation time, T1. The spin-spin relaxation is caused by the presence of small local magnetic fields, arising from the electrons, magnetic nuclei, and other magnetic dipoles surrounding a particular nucleus. These fields cause slight variations in the resonance frequency of the individual nuclei, which results in a broadening of the NMR resonance line. Often this broadening is caused by two types of local fields: a static component, which gives rise to a so-called inhomogeneous broadening, and local fields which are fluctuating in time as a result of molecular motions and interactions between magnetic nuclei. The latter phenomenon results in a so-called homogeneous broadening.
Magnetic resonance imaging and magnetic resonance spectroscopy are used extensively in biological research and medicine, both for in vitro investigations of cells and tissues and for in vivo measurements on animals and humans. Both methods are non-invasive and non-destructive and are used for a large variety of applications, including the detection and diagnosis of lesions and diseases, and the evaluation of therapy response. One particularly useful MRS technique is 1H nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. 1H NMR spectroscopy has been used extensively to study metabolic changes in diseased cells and tissues and the effects of therapy. The resonance lines corresponding to several key mobile compounds have been observed, and their spectral intensities have been linked to the tumor phenotype, tumorigenesis, tumor size, increased proliferation of cells, cell apoptosis, and necrosis.
However, a serious typically problem associated with these applications is the relatively large widths of the MR resonance lines that are observed using conventional MRI and MRS. This reduces the MRI and MRS sensitivity, and, for MRS, can result in severely overlapping spectral lines, which can impede the analysis of the spectrum. It has been established that in biological materials the line widths are mainly caused by inhomogeneous broadening. In intact cells and tissues, the possible mechanisms that broaden the lines inhomogeneously include residual chemical shift anisotropy interaction and local magnetic field gradients arising from variations in the bulk magnetic susceptibility at the various compartment boundaries present in the cells and tissues. It is believed in the art that the bulk magnetic susceptibility variations are the main mechanisms responsible for the broadening. Using cell extracts can eliminate this broadening, but this procedure cannot be applied in live subjects, it is time consuming and may introduce spectral artifacts.
It is well known that the susceptibility broadening and other inhomogeneous broadening mechanisms can be eliminated by magic angle spinning (MAS), where the sample is rotated about an axis with an angle of 54° 44′ (or cos−1 (3−1/2)) with respect to the static magnetic field direction. A problem with MAS is that when the value of the spinning rate is small compared to the width of the broadening, the resonant peak splits into a group of spinning sidebands (SSBs) separated by the spinning rate. If the value of the spinning rate is less than the isotropic spectral width, the analysis of the spectra becomes considerably difficult due to the overlapping of the SSBs associated with the different resonant peaks. This problem can be avoided by increasing the spinning rate to eliminate the SSBs in the spectral region of interest. Indeed it has been shown that fast MAS, where a sample is rotated at a speed of several kHz, produces a significant narrowing of the MR lines in cells and tissues (see Weybright et al., Gradient, High-Resolution, Magic Angle Spinning 1H Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Intact Cells, Magnetic Resonance in Medicine 1998; 39: 337-345; and Cheng et al., Quantitative Neuropathology by High Resolution Magic Angle Spinning Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 1997; 94: 6408-6413). However, the large centrifugal force associated with such high spinning rates destroys the tissue structure and even part of the cells (see Weybright et al.). Consequently, MAS at a high spinning speed is not suitable, for example, to map the metabolite distribution in intact biological tissues or to study live cells, and is impossible to use on live subjects.
A possible way to overcome the problems associated with fast MAS is to use slow sample spinning. Many methods have been developed in solid state NMR to eliminate the spinning sidebands or to separate them from the isotropic spectrum so that a sideband free isotropic chemical shift spectrum is obtained. One approach is the so-called magic angle turning (MAT) techniques, and sideband free isotropic chemical shift spectra have been obtained in solids at spinning rates as low as 30 Hz (Hu et al., Magic Angle Turning and Hopping, in Encyclopedia of Magnetic Resonance D. M. Grant, and R. K. Harris, Eds. New York: John Wiley & Sons: 1996, 2914-2921).
MAT is a two dimensional (2D) NMR technique that was developed to determine the chemical shift tensors of rare spins such as 13C and 15N in solids. There are basically two types of MAT experiments. The first type (MAT-1) is based on the Magic Angle Hopping (MAH) experiment pioneered by Bax et al., Correlation of Isotropic Shifts and Chemical Shift Anisotropies by Two-Dimensional Fourier-Transform Magic-Angle Hopping NMR Spectroscopy, J. Magn. Reson. 1983; 52: 147. The second class (MAT-2) involves the use of five radio frequency π pulses during a constant evolution time period (e.g., one rotor period). MAT-2 techniques include the five π replicated magic angle turning (FIREMAT) (Hu et al., An Isotropic Chemical Shift-Chemical Shift Anisotropy Magic Angle Slow-Spinning 2D NMR Experiment, J. Magn. Reson. 1993; A 105: 82-87; and Alderman et al., A High Resolution High Sensitivity Isotropic and Anisotropic Correlation Experiment, Molecular Physics 1998; 95(6): 1113-1126) and the 2D-phase-altered spinning sidebands (PASS) techniques (Antzutkin et al., Two-Dimensional Sideband Separation in Magic-Angle-Spinning NMR,. J. Magn. Reson 1995; A115: 7-19). All of these experiments are 2D isotropic-anisotropic chemical shift correlation experiments yielding a high resolution isotropic chemical shift dimension and a chemical shift anisotropy dimension. Although MAT has been applied in solid state NMR (see Hu et al., Magic Angle Turning and Hopping; Gan et al., High-Resolution Chemical Shift and Chemical Shift Anisotropy Correlation in Solids Using Slow Magic Angle Spinning, J. Am. Chem. Soc. 1992; 114: 8307-8309; Hu et al., Magic-Angle-Turning Experiments for Measuring Chemical-Shift-Tensor Principal Values in Powdered Solids, J. Magn. Reson. 1995: A 113: 210-222; Hu et al., An Isotropic Chemical Shift-Chemical Shift Anisotropy Magic Angle Slow-Spinning 2D NMR Experiment; Alderman et al., A High Resolution High Sensitivity Isotropic and Anisotropic Correlation Experiment; and Antzutkin et al., Two-Dimensional Sideband Separation in Magic-Angle-Spinning NMR), its potential for biological research has not been explored.
One of the reasons that MAT for biological objects, as opposed to solid objects, has not been investigated is the belief that the diffusion of the molecules containing the nuclei of interest in the internal static local magnetic fields results in a time-dependent field as experienced by the nuclei. This effect worsens if the spinning frequency is reduced, resulting in imperfect suppression of the SSBs. In other words, it was expected that MAT techniques could not be employed in biological materials because the Brownian motions, which cause metabolites to diffuse throughout the cells, would make it impossible to remove the susceptibility broadening with slow MAS. Indeed, it was shown that in a standard fast MAS experiment of water embedded in glass beads the spectral lines become broad even at spinning speeds of several hundred Hz (see Leu et al, Amplitude Modulation and Relaxation Due to Diffusion in NMR Experiments With a Rotating Sample, Chem. Phys. Lett. 2000; 332:344-350), and that a sideband-suppression technique called total suppression of sidebands (TOSS) was ineffective for suppressing SSBs arising from water embedded in glass beads when the spinning speed was lowered to 1 kHz (see Liu et al, Manipulation of Phase and Amplitude Modulation of Spin magnetization in Magic Angle Spinning NMR in the Presence of Molecular Diffusion, J. Chem. Phys. 2001: 114: 5729-5734).
Another approach for increasing the sensitivity and resolution of NMR spectroscopy involves rotating the magnetic field rather than the sample. According to this approach the sample remains stationary. For example, Bradbury et al., Nuclear Magnetic Resonance in a Rotating Magnetic Field, Phys. Letters 1968; 26A: 405-406, disclose rotating the static magnetic field by superposing a static field and two sinusoidal fields in phase quadrature in the plane perpendicular to the static field and with amplitudes that are a factor √2 larger than that of the static component. A further development of this technique for line narrowing in bulk samples has recently reported (see Sakellariou et al., NMR In Rotating Magnetic Fields: Magic-Angle Field Spinning, Magn. Res. Imaging 2005: 23(2): 295-299).